{"id":49264,"date":"2025-02-28T12:05:43","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T17:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/chembe\/?post_type=news&p=49264"},"modified":"2025-02-28T12:05:43","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T17:05:43","slug":"sticky-science-how-thicker-fluids-turn-stem-cells-toward-new-roles","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/chembe\/news\/sticky-science-how-thicker-fluids-turn-stem-cells-toward-new-roles\/","title":{"rendered":"Sticky science: How thicker fluids turn stem cells toward new roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johns Hopkins engineers have discovered how the thickness of fluids surrounding stem cells can affect their behavior and development\u2014insights that have the potential to enhance therapies for bone healing and tissue regeneration. The team\u2019s results<\/a> appear in Science Advances.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that the viscosity \u2013 the thickness \u2013 of the fluid around stem cells can have a big impact on how they develop, opening up new possibilities for advancing regenerative medicine,\u201d said Alice Amitrano, a doctoral student in the Whiting School of Engineering\u2019s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering<\/a>, who led the study with Qinling Yuan, also a doctoral student in the department.<\/p>\n

Supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, the team explored how extracellular fluid viscosity affects human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs), which are found in tissues such as bone marrow, umbilical cord tissue, and fat, and are uniquely capable of developing into various cell types, including bone and fat cells.<\/p>\n

Scientists have long understood that the stiffness of the surface on which these cells are grown plays a major role in guiding what type of cells they become. Soft surfaces tend to lead to fat cell development, while stiff surfaces promote bone cell formation.<\/p>\n

Previous studies investigated hMSCs behavior in fluids with a thickness similar to that of water. But in the human body, fluids around tissues have a higher viscosity, with thickness increasing even more at tumor sites.<\/p>\n

Amitrano and her colleagues took a new approach, studying the cells in fluids of varying thicknesses, including one similar to that of the human body, by adding a substance called methylcellulose to the nutrient-rich liquid that supports cell growth in the lab. They discovered that increasing the viscosity this way caused hMSCs on soft gels\u2014which would typically develop into fat cells\u2014to switch and become bone cells instead.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that increasing the viscosity of the surrounding fluid caused cells that would normally become fat cells on soft surfaces to instead turn into bone cells,\u201d said Amitrano. \u201cThese observations revealed that the change in differentiation was triggered by the higher viscosity, which activated signaling pathways and proteins that promote cell development. In other words, viscosity is a key physical property of the surrounding environment; it plays a role that can be just as, if not more, influential than surface stiffness.<\/p>\n

The team also found that these changes were not temporary; \u201cthe cells retained the effects of the higher viscosity for at least nine days, even after the medium returned to normal, a phenomenon known as \u2018mechanomemory,\u2019\u201d said Yuan.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis ability to control stem cell differentiation in response to viscosity could open new avenues for treating bone-related conditions and tissue regeneration. We hope this research will have a positive impact on stem cell therapies,\u201d said Konstantinos Konstantopoulos<\/a>, William H. Schwarz Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a core researcher with the Whiting School\u2019s Institute for NanoBioTechnology..<\/p>\n

Study co-authors included Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering PhD students Bhawana Agarwal and Anindya Sen; Department of Biomedical Engineering<\/a> PhD student Yoseph W. Dance and Assistant Professor Jude M. Phillip<\/a>; and Department of Materials Science<\/a> PhD student Yi Zuo and Assistant Professor Luo Gu<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This work was also supported by the Maryland Stem Cell Research Fund and the American Federation of Aging Research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","class_list":["post-49264","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry","news_categories-faculty","news_categories-phd","news_categories-research"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSticky science: How thicker fluids turn stem cells toward new roles - Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/chembe\/news\/sticky-science-how-thicker-fluids-turn-stem-cells-toward-new-roles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sticky science: How thicker fluids turn stem cells toward new roles - Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Johns Hopkins engineers have discovered how the thickness of fluids surrounding stem cells can affect their behavior and development\u2014insights that have the potential to enhance therapies for bone healing and…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/chembe\/news\/sticky-science-how-thicker-fluids-turn-stem-cells-toward-new-roles\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Sticky science: How thicker fluids turn stem cells toward new roles - 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